"If the pro-European parties win, Moldova's course towards European
integration could become irreversible," Arcadie Barbarosie, executive
director of the Institute for Public Policy in Chisinau told the AFP
news agency.

"If Moldova turns back towards the customs union [with Russia],
however, it risks remaining forever in Russia's sphere of influence."

Friday, November 14, 2014

Consider this week’s spat between Sheldon Adelson and Abraham Foxman. At an event last Sunday, Adelson’s fellow oligarch, Chaim Saban, said Israel needed to support a Palestinian state if it wanted to remain a Jewish democracy. To which Adelson replied, “I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy. I think God didn’t say anything about democracy. God talked about all the good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state, otherwise Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state — so what?”

So what? With that question, Adelson lobbed a grenade at the American Jewish establishment. When the American Jewish establishment defends Israel, it doesn’t talk much about God. That’s because while theological language plays well among conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, it tends to alienate secular liberals. Indeed, it alienates some of the secular liberals who populate American Jewish organizations. As a result, America’s mainstream Jewish groups generally justify Israeli policy not via religion but via America’s civil religion—democracy—a creed that enjoys unquestioned reverence across the political spectrum. By claiming democracy doesn’t matter, Adelson was sabotaging the case for Israel that the American Jewish establishment has been making for decades. Which is why one of that establishment’s senior members, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, called Adelson’s remarks “disturbing on many levels.” Foxman added that, “the founders of Israel got it exactly right when they emphasized the country being both a Jewish and democratic state. Any initiatives that move Israel away from either value would ill-serve the state and people of Israel.”

The problem is that Israel has been pursuing just such an initiative for almost a half-century now. Since 1967, it has established dominion over millions of West Bank Palestinians who lack citizenship or the right to vote in the state that controls their lives. (...)

For years now, the American Jewish establishment has been laundering Israel’s behavior for American consumption: Justifying Israel’s undemocratic settlement policies in the soothing language of democratic values. But right-wingers like Adelson increasingly refuse to play along. Claiming you cherish Israeli democracy, after all, requires claiming that the West Bank Palestinians who Israel currently controls should one day have a state of their own. Since the American Jewish right sees that as both dangerous to Israeli security and an affront to God, it is challenging the American Jewish establishment by bluntly advocating a one-state solution in which millions of Palestinians are permanently disenfranchised, democracy be damned. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which Adelson helps bankroll, has partnered with conservative Christians to pass resolutions in the Florida and South Carolina legislatures declaring that they “consider Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem to be part of Israel.” The ZOA pushed a similar resolution at the Republican National Convention in 2012 but was stymied by AIPAC, which wanted both parties to go on record as supporting the two state solution.

Behind this growing conflict between the Jewish center and the Jewish right lies a demographic shift. Historically, mainstream American Jewish groups have been dominated by relatively secular Jews who vote Democratic and hold fairly liberal views on domestic issues, even as they passionately defend Israel against external criticism. But the children of these secular American Zionists are more likely to inherit their parents’ secularism than their Zionism. They’re not anti-Zionists. They’re just not as interested in devoting their free time to defending an Israeli government from which they feel distant, if not alienated.

As a result, the younger American Jews most willing to dedicate themselves to the “Pro-Israel” cause come disproportionately from an Orthodox community that is growing in both size and self-confidence. But Orthodox Jews, unlike their more secular counterparts, don’t generally hold liberal views on domestic issues. They mostly vote Republican. They’re more likely to explicitly reject the two state solution, and to justify that rejection by invoking God’s promise to give Jews the land. All of which makes them more willing to embrace the right-wing Christian evangelicals who more secular American Jews fear. (...)

Once upon a time, Jews from across the political spectrum joined groups like AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League or the American Jewish Committee. Now the liberals are more likely to join J Street or even Jewish Voices for Peace and the conservatives are more likely to join the ZOA, the Republican Jewish Coalition or the Emergency Committee for Israel.

For years, the American Jewish center has tried to uphold the fiction that you can both support the two state solution and support Israel’s right to destroy the two state solution. Now the contradiction between those two imperatives is fracturing American Jewish institutional life. The result is an intra-Jewish debate that is fiercer, more divisive and more honest.

Monday, November 10, 2014

In an influential book in 1991, Samuel Huntington established the
“two-turnover” test to distinguish between emerging and consolidated
democracies. For a democracy to be consolidated, according to the test,
free and fair elections must twice have led to the peaceful handover of
office between an incumbent and a successful challenger. As Huntington
notes, this is a very difficult test. American democracy was not
consolidated until Jacksonian Democrats lost the presidency to the Whigs
in 1840.

The secularist Nida Tunis’s defeat of the moderate Islamist Ennahda in
Tunisia’s elections last week brought the fledgling democracy a big step
closer to passing Huntington’s test. The elections also strengthen the embattled forces for democracy
throughout the Middle East and Muslim world. Tunisia’s successful
democratic experiment despite rising extremism and a weak economy trumps
Turkey’s already bogus claim to being the model for democratizing
Muslim countries. In reality, Turkey has never been a viable model for
Muslim democracy, since it was never a free or liberal democracy in the
first place. (...)

If there is any model of Muslim democracy post-Arab Spring, it is Tunisia, not Turkey. (...)

While Turkey has descended down this authoritarian spiral over the past
two years, Tunisia has achieved the most impressive democratic
transformation in the history of the region. Tunisia had its first free
elections in October 2011 after the fall of the Ben Ali regime. Ennahda
won a plurality of seats (41 percent) and soon reached a power-sharing
agreement with two secular parties in the Constituent Assembly. One of
the things Tunisians got right was the rejection of presidentialism in
favor of parliamentary democracy. Tunisians recognized the dangers of
presidentialism in a country with a weak democratic tradition and
historic lack of checks and balances. Tunisians also chose proportional
representation with a zero-percent national threshold, giving the
greatest possible representation to different voices in parliament.
Turkey headed in the opposition direction. The AKP government tried
unsuccessfully to use its majority to change the country’s parliamentary
system into a presidential regime and to switch from the current
PR-based electoral system to a “first-past-the-post” majoritarian
system, which could give the AKP a supermajority while denying smaller
parties’ representation. Turkey has one of the highest and most
undemocratic electoral thresholds (10 percent) in the world; but the
lack of representativeness of the electoral system has never been a real
concern for the AKP elite.

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

He'll not thank me for saying so, but I agree with Sam Bowman's call for a basic income (or, as he calls it, negative income tax). This raises a question: how can a Marxist so warmly agree with a right(ish)-libertarian?

In part, it is because Marxism is a form of libertarianism. But there's two other sources of agreement between us.

One is that I agree with Sam that alternatives to a basic income, such as a living wage, are inferior to the extent that they would price some people out of work. And I also agree that capitalism cannot provide full employment. We differ on how we express this: Sam would emphasize some people having a low marginal product and the effects of automation whilst I'd stress more systemic defects of capitalism. (...)

Secondly, I suspect we agree in rejecting the idea that the welfare state should have a moralistic purpose. From the "less eligibility" principle of the Poor Law, through Beveridge's plan to "make and keep men fit for service", to New Labour's use of tax credits to "make work pay", the Welfare State has always tried to encourage work. Libertarians and Marxists are, or should be, sceptical of this. Libertarians because the state in a free society should be neutral between ways of life. And Marxists because we don't think the state should be capitalism's human resources department. (...)

Where, then, might we differ? The answer, I think, lies in the level of basic income.

Monday, November 03, 2014

I'd love to see an anarcho-capitalist take on the Disney Princess narratives. Where did the resources come from that paid for the castle? In one of the songs in Frozen, Anna sings "who knew we had a thousand salad plates?"

Who paid for those thousand salad plates?

Perhaps Anna and Elsa's parents were the pictures of wise and benevolent rulers, trading protection of property rights for tax revenue, but who had their dreams deferred in order to pay for a thousand salad plates collecting dust in the palace?

The "benevolent ruler" view comes into question toward the end of the movie when there is a royal proclamation that the kingdom of Arendelle will no longer do business with "Weasel Town." Granted, the Duke of Weselton is a scoundrel, but why should the queen stand between her subjects and willing trading partners in Weselton? How is the edict to be enforced?

I suspect there are much darker histories behind the princes and princesses than Disney (or the original authors of the fairy tales on which Disney movies are based) is willing to admit. What happened before "once upon a time"? How did the royal families get their power? And how, for that matter, would they respond to competing providers of security services in their jurisdictions?